Neither side lands knockout blow in AWU affair

Personal sleaze allegations are dangerous places for politicians to go, as much for the accusers as for the accused.

So predictions that Monday would be an explosive day in federal politics as the opposition made good its promise to pursue
Julia Gillard
over the matter of her honesty and integrity in the Australia Workers’ Union affair were always unlikely to materialise.

What happened instead was a delicate picking through the minefield of this matter by both the accuser, Opposition Deputy Leader
Julie Bishop
, and the accused, Prime Minister Gillard.

What this produced was more like the atmosphere of a courtroom and a battle of wits between two lawyers than a parliamentary hothouse and a brawl between two bitter political opponents.

It was a question time in which every one of the opposition’s eight questions about the AWU matter – all asked by Bishop – produced no big-bang political moment.

But there was a feeling at the end of it that Gillard has still not been able to kill off the threat this issue poses to her reputation.

The danger has not passed. Opposition Leader
Tony Abbott
and his team know that each time Bishop rises to ask her next question of Gillard, Labor MPs hold their breath, fearing it could be the killer question.

Labor MPs desperately want Gillard to swat the AWU issue away and to focus the debate on the policy and leadership differences with the Coalition.

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But because the matters surrounding Gillard’s role as the lawyer advising her then boyfriend union secretary and another union official about the creation of the AWU’s Workplace Reform Association happened so long ago and so many gaps in records and recollections exist, this is not something that can be swatted away.

Gillard cannot kill it off. So yesterday her tactic was to try to make it harder for the opposition to keep it alive. For the Coalition, there are real risks in pursuing the AWU matter beyond its political use-by date. That date depends on the issue being refreshed by new information – or by Gillard cracking under pressure and giving the story fresh legs.

At her press conference and in Parliament, she charged that Abbott had dishonoured the legacy of
John Howard
’s leadership of the Coalition by abandoning policy and principle – a charge which many Labor traditionalists to whom Howard is still a hate figure would have found difficult to stomach.

But the government believes that voters are increasingly comparing Abbott’s leadership unfavourably with Howard’s. Abbott himself knows that he has to turn around these doubts and make the transition from opposition leader to alternative prime minister.

That will be his great challenge in 2013. With just three days of Parliament remaining before the summer adjournment, the opposition has little to lose by persisting with its parliamentary strategy.

And while Gillard tries to make a political virtue of her claim that she has opened herself to unprecedented questioning about the matter, there are enough questions that she has either been unable to fully answer or has avoided answering to give the opposition enough ammunition to keep its attack going for three more days.